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Rob Ford comedy ensues but Toronto’s not laughing: Mallick

It may have escaped the attention of everyone in Toronto, but the Rob Ford “I’m sorry but c’mon, not that sorry” non-resignation speech was hilarious on a global scale, by which I mean everyone else on the planet is laughing. Comedy has ensued.

Toronto is laughing in a herniated way, like you do in an interview for a job you’re frankly not going to get and you both know it.

Protest outside Toronto City Hall after Toronto Mayor Rob Ford apologized again after he admitted that he has smoked crack cocaine. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star)

I am particularly entranced by the “Probably in One of My Drunken Stupors” T-shirts being sold on zazzle.com. “Particularly entranced” is the kind of frozen thing Prince Charles would say when touring an artisanal henhouse but face it, where are you going to wear that T-shirt? Fairview Mall? Dixon Road? I wouldn’t.

It would be hilarious on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton though, or anywhere west of the Rockies or on the Greyhound route north of Toronto to fabulous Porquis Junction, a place I have only visited at 3 a.m. Hearty laughter would erupt.

You could wear it with the tie Ford chose to make the announcement that he was staying as mayor to protect taxpayers and with god’s blessing. It was an American tie, a 1995 NFL football thing splattered with, get this, logos that included the racist Washington Redskins’ Indian headdress. It sells on eBay for $24.99, one cent less than $25 and that is one bargain tie.

When you combine the tie, Ford’s personal pinkness and the glowering matching-pink brother standing behind him with that amazing hair, a slicked-back crewcut, it was outstanding, just outstanding. I did not think Rob Ford had a flattering adjacency—a person to stand next to you to make you look good in comparison—but Doug Ford is it.

Toronto’s still not laughing. Taiwanese animation sites are though. I give you the Taiwanese Animators on YouTube, which leaves me in awe at their cleverness as well as their political acuity in coming up with a cartoon of Ford standing on a map of “Old Toronto” surrounded by the “Cracky Toronto” that voted him into office.

Cracky Toronto, why didn’t I think of a great gag like that? Because I was transfixed in horror during Ford’s announcement that he was only going to get drunk in his basement from now on, meaning, one supposes, that he’s only a social crack-smoker, which all of us surely are. Who would do crack sober?

I laughed. I even laughed when Jon Stewart called all of Toronto over to Camera 3 for a private talk—which he only does when he’s doing a Donald Trump intervention—and called Ford voters a bunch of enablers. “Are you waiting for this man to hit rock-bottom? Are you waiting for him to text pictures of his d—k?”

It was then that I noticed I was watching the show with my legs not crossed, but knotted, with my right foot stuck behind my left calf, and I was curled in the fetal position with that look you get just before the nurse sticks the needle in an arm vein.

Toronto has been stripped and shamed before the world, and not before time, I’m not saying it’s unfair. What I’m saying is that the world is not holding back in the way that we all did before the election that made Ford the mayor of this city.

The world thinks Ford is funny because he is as round as a barrel, because he is Fatty McFatFat, and they are not shy about saying this. I’m sorry, did I use the word “fat?” No, not in the singular. Note that Stephen Marche, a Canadian writing in the New York Times, calls Toronto “an expanding hot mess” and Ford what happens if you elect “a feral 16-year-old boy” as mayor, but he does not use the word “fat.” I take heart. We are still nice people, not that it does us much good.

How can I put this, Ford is not, as Anthony Burgess would say, “adventitiously endowed with irrelevant photogeneity” and that’s a nice piece of British circularity that is serving me well here.

The Taiwanese animators have Ford in a suit jacket over huge white underpants and he is lying on his back in the animation with his crotch centre-screen, I think being tickled by Mounties, or perhaps they are pulling the crack video out of, oh never mind. I get that. Nothing’s funnier than underpants.

It is impossible to be as rude as foreigners are about Ford’s weight. It’s wrong and pointless, especially when we still love John Candy and think Planes, Trains and Automobiles was the funniest movie ever made, which I do. The sexually incontinent mayor of San Diego was funny—in a temporary I-like-to-leave-saliva-on-employees’-faces way—because he had fish lips and a permanent leer. The mayor of Toronto is funny in the eyes of the world not just because he is a liar, an angry drunk, everyone’s brother-in-law, a jerk and a human hootenanny but because he is fat.

He is so fat that mocking him is just too easy, which is partly why Stewart called a halt. I am the kind of person who once wrote a stalwart defence of Anthony Weiner because I don’t approve of mocking men’s private parts. Stewart went all-out on Weiner’s underpanted and non-underpanted crotch and rightly so, but I still squirmed.

But Stewart decided not to mock our “Chris Farley Tribute mayor.”

“Will I lose jokes?” he asked. “In the short term, of course. But my guess is that Ford is a long-term investment. Mayor Ford’s a lot of fun to ridicule. Not a lot of fun to eulogize.”

It was an excellent point.

In the meantime the Taiwanese Animators say they’ve done Rob Ford five times now, more than they have done “the Biebs.”

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